Too Sexy For My Books

It seems that everyday there is a new location/map/where-am-I?-here-I-am!/GPS thingy available. I am continually amazed that such technology is available, yet alone in such abundance. I guess this sense of wonder and amazement is due to the fact that I learnt to navigate many, many moons ago, well before GPS was a viable option, especially in the middle of nowhere Back-o’-Bourke.

I learnt to navigate the old skool way – prism compass, ordnance map, ruler, pencil and paper. Before setting off out bush you didn’t get out your GPS to check your route, instead you sat down and did a lot of maths. The first thing that was necessary was to calculate true north as opposed to what the map said. Grid to Magnetic: Subtract. If I’m lost in a city, cannot find the name of the street I’m on and have a tourist map, I still find myself doing a very basic triangulation – not with my personal location/map whatsit but rather in my head. True, I am not able to give you a six figure grid reference but I can tell you where we are within a relatively small triangle.

Despite having the sense of direction of a turnip, I always enjoyed nav. It’s the maths. I enjoyed sitting under a seldom tree in the searing heat of an Australian summer, in random middle of whoop-whoop places delighting in names such as ‘Buckingbong State Forest’, and figuring out on paper where I was, where I wanted to be and how I was going to get there. Just a map, a pencil, a notebook and a compass – no GPS, no calculator, no technology as we know it. Dead reckoning has always fascinated me.

The ability now to so easily pinpoint your location and transmit that information to the world is fantastic. I love that you can easily check Google maps etc to find out where something is, what’s nearby and how you get there. I am a big fan of my satnav (or was when I used to have a car or drive BB’s truck in Copenhagen – complete with racing tyres *shakes head*). Yet there are times when I like to be able to sit down and enjoy the planning and the computation of angles and degrees, having to re-plot a course upon realising the contour lines there turn that seemingly innocuous hill into Mount F@£!-Off. If you ever go bushwalking with me please don’t bring your personal GPS or online maps, I don’t want to know.

I’m interested to know in what applications and technologies are around that you, dear reader, are amazed by and use, yet deep down inside you feel they take that little bit away from the adventure and romance of the world.

“Lonely Stretch, The Triffids”